Skully

Skully is a good 3D platformer with some good ideas. It doesn’t do anything revolutionary or outstanding, but if you’re a fan of the genre, you’ll have a good time with it.

Don’t be fooled by the nice-looking world, fun characters, or interesting story. Skully is a clever game with fun puzzles, and some of the most blisteringly difficult 3D platforming I’ve encountered in years. Be ready to challenge yourself as difficulty spikes put you in a blender and spit you back out. Skully is fun, satisfying and well-made, but not for the faint of heart.

Skully is light-hearted, old-skool fun. In an era of online shooters and battle royale titles it is a breath of fresh air. At times difficult but not overly so, it will respect your platforming skills and have you performing daring feats. Nothing is incredibly unique here but what you have is executed well. Skully is not my favourite game of the year but fun distraction nonetheless.

Even if it's not a perfect adventure, it may still be worth checking Skully out if you're a fan of puzzle-platformers.

If you are really, really into the platformer genre and have enough patience, Skully may be a good choice for you. But even then, the 30$ asking price seems too much for the amount of content Skully is offering.

Skully is a platformer full of challenges. The game is heavily testing not only your agility but also your patience. While it has an interesting basic concept, it feels unfinished and does not manage to immerse you in its world. When you see the rolling skull you would expect dynamic and fluid gameplay. Instead, you are presented with jumps that require ultimate precision and obstacles with errors in collision detection which force you to adopt a slow and careful approach. With more attention to details and some more polishing Skully could have been an entertaining experience. Unfortunately, it just proves to be a modest attempt to make a cute platformer.

I hate being that guy who basically says "this isn’t the game I wanted to play", but in Skully’s case it seems the most appropriate conclusion. So much of the game concentrates on mechanics that were rightfully abandoned and too little fulfils the marble rolling promise of its early footage. Looks like I’m still waiting, like a strangely bearded Cinderalla, to go to the ball.

It’s hard to hold the positives in one’s mind without reminiscing on the kind of game Skully could’ve been. Yet take out the personal ambition of this being some grand, 3D adventure to explore in another scenario and Skully is still too much a case of good intentions marred by bad or downright odd decision-making in parts. While die-hard followers of the genre are sure to scrape together some joy in the spots of twitch-heavy platforming and hunt for collectibles the game affords, the lingering of one too many time-heavy design choices and back-end issues means the best Skully can hope for is the perception of a flawed “charming-enough” effort. Whether you can look past the inconsistent physics work, rough technical performance or the narrative’s hackneyed attempt at something resembling personality, will depend on how invested you are in the gameplay. It’s a rough, uneven, disappointingly-middle of the road trek. But for all its faults, Skully‘s acknowledging and understanding of 3D platforming’s appeal does count for something. A game whose heart is most certainly in the right place.

Skully is a throwback to the golden age of 3D platforming that has an interesting story, but an inconsistent difficulty level that is at times frustrating to play through. It might scratch that 3D puzzle platforming itch, but ultimately falls short of being a memorable experience.

Fortunately, there was a lot of promise here with Skully. A nice and endearing story with platforming mechanics that make for interesting utility makes the game seem exciting, but it just doesn't execute its plan well. In a way I feel like the game has a bit of an identity crisis; while it could focus on being an excellent marble physics platformer, it has all of these other great ideas that ultimately end up hurting the whole product. With a bigger focus on one thing and improvement to level design, I could see a game like this working pretty well, but unfortunately, Skully is not that game.

A strange bug meant that I twice lost control of the golems, watching helplessly as they plunged into the nearest hazard. Sometimes when climbing vines, Skully would fall off for no reason. There were invisible walls, times when Skully deflected off platforms at an unnatural angle, and times when the lava would just disappear. A lot of players will likely give up before they reach the end of the game. It’s a shame but completely understandable when the game has a heart that’s let down by myriad problems.